1. Field
The disclosure relates to a method, system, and article of manufacture for a hybrid data model and user interaction for data sets in a user interface.
2. Background
In certain software applications, a user may need to view and interact with a set of data in tabular form, wherein the set of data may be stored in a server. When the data sets are of a reasonable size, all of the data can be loaded into a data model in a client at start-up and the user can then page, sort, filter, and search a data set without any further interactions with the server. Such an approach for interacting with a data set may be referred to as a “simple” data model approach. In certain situations, in which the data set is a table, the “simple” data model may include all of the rows of a data set represented in the user interface and may allow paging, sorting, filtering, searching and other requests from the user interface by a user.
However, sometimes the data set stored in the server is very large (e.g., hundreds of thousands or millions of records), and it may not be feasible or appropriate to load all of this data at one time. Several solutions exist for “large” data model support in which a table data model (maintained at a client) representing the data set requests only the “chunk” of data needed by a user at a given time. Subsequent requests to page, sort, filter, and search are delegated by the table data model to the server instead of being handled directly at the client. The table data model stored at the client cannot support these operations directly because the table model stored at the client is only aware of a subset of data at any one time.